The present disclosure relates to data storage management and virtualization, and relates more particularly to improving performance of data storage management and virtualization structures that employ redundant array of independent disk (RAID) operations and schemes. In existing distributed storage networks, drives in a local/remote enclosure can be operatively connected to a host controller, which can control RAID and/or other storage operations.
Existing approaches used to address various drawbacks include increasing RAID controller processor resources, and/or increasing bandwidth between the RAID controller and the disks. Therefore, typical approaches for improving RAID initialization, rebuild and copyback operations include increasing RAID controller CPU horsepower/resources, increasing bandwidth between the RAID controller and disks. Meanwhile, the expanders are typically used for facilitating communication between the large numbers of devices and are not directly involved in RAID operations such as I/O operations. These approaches merely scale up existing techniques, leaving the same issues that nevertheless remain. Existing approaches can take excessive time for performing initialization and highly time sensitive rebuild/copyback operation thereby exposing various data loss risks due to additional drive failures and affecting the I/O performance during these RAID operations. Existing approaches can also lead to more bandwidth usage between host controller and expanders, and a corresponding increase in power consumption. Therefore, there is a desire to more efficiently appropriate resources in a RAID system, especially between RAID controllers and expanders.